China

Hessler: Gold Farmers and Copy Artists of Lishui

Great city profile in this week’s New Yorker by Peter Hessler.

The city profiled is Lishui, a third-tier Chinese factory town in Zhejiang Province, with a population of around two hundred and fifty thousand.

The city economy ranges from impressionist paintings done for export to gold farmers in the online game World of Warcraft.

A few choice quotes, full article here (Registration required) and Audio Slide Show here. (Disclosure: The New Yorker sends me PDFs of their China-related stories):

Lishui’s copy-artists view on world art tastes

Chen and Hu could rarely identify the foreign scenes that they painted, but they had acquired some ideas about national art tastes from their commissions. “Americans prefer brighter pictures,” Hu told me. “They like scenes to be lighter.

Russians like bright colors, too. Koreans like them to be more subdued, and Germans like things that are grayer. The French are like that, too.”

Chen flipped to HF-3075: a snow-covered house with glowing lights. “Chinese people like this kind of picture,” she said. “Ugly! And they like this one.” HF-3068: palm trees on a beach.

“It’s stupid, something a child would like. Chinese people have no taste. French people have the best taste, followed by Russians, and then the other Europeans.” I asked her how Americans stacked up. “Americans are after that,” she said. “We’ll do a painting and the European customer won’t buy it, and then we’ll show it to a Chinese person, and he’ll say, ‘Great!’ ”

Gold farmers recognize each other online
Wu couldn’t understand any of it; his ex-cook brother-in-law had taught him to play the game strictly by memorizing shapes and icons. At one point, Wu’s character encountered piles of dead Sandfury Axe Throwers and Hideskinners, and he said to me, “There’s another player around here. I bet he’s Chinese, too. You can tell because he’s killing everybody just to get the treasure.”

After a while, we saw the other player, whose character was a dwarf. I typed in a message: “How are you doing?” Wu didn’t want me to write in Chinese, for fear that administrators would spot him as a gold farmer.

Initially, there was no response; I tried again. At last, the dwarf spoke: “???”

I typed, “Where are you from?” This time he wrote, “Sorry.” From teaching English in China, I knew that’s how all students respond to any question they can’t answer. And that was it; the dwarf resumed his methodical slaughter in silence. “You see?” Wu said, laughing.

“I told you he’s Chinese!”

Final thoughts on gold farmers

After I returned to the United States, I talked with a cousin who played World of Warcraft. He told me that he could usually recognize Chinese gold farmers from their virtual appearance, because they stood out as being extremely ill-equipped. If they gained valuable gear or weapons, they sold them immediately; their characters were essentially empty-handed.

I liked that image—even on-line the Chinese travelled light.

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